Books: Again, Deeping

ROPER'S Row—Warwick Deeping— Knopf ($2.50). "Dark and pale," Chris Hazzard was a "little fellow, narrow shouldered, fragile, and lame"—with a big head and "defiant" hair and "a something in his eyes." Ruth Avery, living next-room in London's poverty-stricken Roper's Row, was "a dusky thing, far darker than he was—slim and sensitive . . . not smiling her face had a mute, apprehensive sadness." Yet to Ruth, as to all persons, Hazzard felt unfriendly, not only because he thought his lameness set him apart, but because all social feelings were at a very low ebb in him. He felt all alone when his mother died—alone and on the downgrade of despair, until Ruth, sacrificing their reputations and her job, went to keep house for him, to take up the work of making a doctor out of him. She succeeded with her £1,000 legacy and her advice, which he followed, that he substitute paying patients for charity ones. Society, the married state and the world outside Roper's Row claimed Chris Hazzard. Thus ends the saga of a man reared by his mother, raised by his wife. Author Deeping, whose Roper's Row bears some slight hero-resemblance to Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, writes with experience of medicine, which he practiced before and during the World War. Deeping's previous Sorrell and Son was rated part and parcel of Anglo-Saxon realism.